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Viva! |
6 July 2000 Cinema’s Say Chickens Can’t Run Plans by the vegetarian charity Viva! to show a commercial depicting a battery hen at screenings of the hit film Chicken Run have been thwarted by the Cinema Advertising Association. The CAA has decreed that simply showing a chicken inside a battery cage ‘will cause unacceptable distress’. The 20-second ad was scheduled to be shown at cinemas in London and carries the endorsement of a leading vegetarian food manufacturer as well as Viva!’s logo. It starts with a close up on a chicken’s eye and some clucking. The camera then slowly zooms out to reveal the chicken’s face and as the music swells it reaches its climax - a caged chicken that can’t spread its wings or move and the slogan Chicken Can’t Run. “Just think about what this censorship means”, says Juliet Gellatley, Viva!’s director. “The conditions in which producers force millions of animals to live are so distressing that we have to be protected from seeing them. What on earth does that say about us as a nation? In fact the young age of the audience was kept very much in mind when making the ad. and there were far more scary sights in the film itself - the silhouette of the farmer’s wife shopping off the head of a chicken with an axe and Rocky about to be shredded in the chicken pie machine. Now it looks as though it’s the chicken industry that’s managed to run - away from its responsibility for the animals it abuses.” But Viva! will continue educating the public about the cruelty of modern farming methods despite the CAA’s decision. It was responsible for getting all British supermarkets to drop the trade in ‘exotic meats’ - kangaroo, ostrich, crocodile and emu. It has recently succeeded in getting Harrods to ban all factory-farmed ducks. And Sainsbury’s, M & S and Asda have all dropped the sale of de-beaked Barbary duck meat after pressure from Viva!. When the film Babe first hit Britain, it was Viva! who was outside cinema’s handing out colourful leaflets entitled ‘Who loves ya, Babe? We do, that’s why we don’t eat you!’ The leaflet described life for a real factory-farmed pig - from the viewpoint of a piglet. Pork sales slumped 10 per cent and stayed permanently down.
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